He wondered if Lansdale’s genuine dose of dope had made him tell them things when he thought he was out cold. But he hadn’t known anything to tell. What if they told him things instead? What if they suggested things to him under that dose that he would eventually come to believe? Lansdale had spoken the language of the Red Scare. What if that became natural to him later, his native language? A way of life. A belief. Faith. What if they had put their own lever inside his brain that could be flipped on at any point, quicker than a knee jerk? He couldn’t rule it out. Injecting him with various radical thoughts, just enough to leave him babbling when he was apprehended. He could be portrayed as anything from an anarchist to a Communist, a reactionary to a fascist. He was already cracked from the war, that much was proven. And a dirty deserter to boot. He was one bad apple.

If all else failed, they were going to use him as their scapegoat. They had tried and tried to save him—tried to cure him—but it just didn’t take. He was acting on his own, they would say. Another GI that was “all out of change,” as it was called—the good soldier who lost his way and his mind. After all, hadn’t Selfer himself told him that there had been reports of him voicing threats to important persons; that he’d declared he’d wanted to kill Ike, President Truman even? He still didn’t remember ever doing that, but it didn’t matter because it was in a report somewhere.

They didn’t even need him alive for it. It was surely cleaner for them that way, all tied up neatly, just the corpse of a cracked and spent vet with the sniper rifle that he worshipped. Someone would clean up the blood.

All the more reason to die, and real damn soon.

He crawled under his blanket but the greasy shroud stuck to his skin, and he couldn’t breathe through it, so he clawed at it and rolled out of it kicking. He lay on the floor, splayed on his back, glaring into the harsh white bulb, panting, drooling.

He was their man, no matter what he did. History proved that much.

He wanted to laugh, but only tears came out.

***

Lett reckoned that another day had passed in his cell. Maybe one and a half. He noted the footsteps of guards passing and didn’t recognize any pattern or schedule. What was more, they passed more infrequently, maybe once or twice a day and no more than one or two men at a time. He wondered if he was the only one left down here, underground. That chilled him, and he pulled the grimy blanket over him and under him to keep his hips from bruising on the concrete.